2023 read #94: Rivers of Time by L. Sprague de Camp.

Rivers of Time by L. Sprague de Camp

259 pages

Published 1993

Read from September 7 to September 8

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

This is a sequence of stories narrated by Reginald Rivers, time-traveling big game hunter and guide, a character best known from “A Gun for Dinosaur.” The series was revived at the start of the ’90s thanks to the anthology / coffee table book combo The Ultimate Dinosaur, a strange beast that I’ll be reviewing soon.

Rivers begins with a poem de Camp published in 1968, “Faunas.” It’s possibly a sonnet, definitely rhyming, and about what you’d expect from 1960s sci-fi poetry. I can’t tell if it’s meant as epigraph or part of this collection, but I’ll treat it as part of the collection.

“A Gun for Dinosaur” (1956, revised version published 1993). One of the classic dinosaur safari tales, which I read and reviewed a geological era ago in the Martin H. Greenberg Dinosaurs anthology. Because it’s been almost a decade since I last read it, I went ahead and read it afresh. It’s fine, I guess? All the casual sexism and low-key racism you’d expect from a midcentury de Camp joint. There are more thorough descriptions of guns than of the Cretaceous fauna. But it’s crisply written and goes down with minimal fuss. That's de Camp's main selling-point as an aithor: his baseline is reliably readable and (usually) mildly entertaining.

“The Cayuse” (1993). Almost four decades after writing the original Reginald Rivers tale, de Camp comes back with somehow even more casual racism and sexism, which immediately soured me on this one. The “Cayuse” of the title is a new off-road vehicle (appropriating the name of the people) that Rivers’ new client, an automobile magnate, insists they bring with them into the Cretaceous, resulting in predictable mishaps. Aside from that, and a Parasaurolophus phallus, this story is more of the same, even returning to the same time period as “A Gun for Dinosaur.” Kind of blurs together with the first one. Shrug?

“Crocamander Quest” (1992). I first read this story about three decades ago, in the previously mentioned Ultimate Dinosaur book. On one hand, I always had a soft spot for this story because it’s one of the few time-tourist narratives that takes us before the classic “Age of Dinosaurs”: Reggie and Chandra Aiyar bring their charges to the Triassic, when early dinos were just one burgeoning group of archosaurs among many. On the other hand, this is the tale of their firm’s first and only time safari with a “mixed” company of women and men, which reads just about as badly as you might guess.

“Miocene Romance” (1993). To follow up on that note, here we have a young woman who’s an “animal rights fanatic” stowing away to be a nuisance on a hunt. She ends up seducing the son of the Texas oil magnate bankrolling the trip. I’d had high hopes for this one — how often do you ever read a Cenozoic time safari? — but it was my least favorite so far. So many lecherous comments, so much oozy misogyny, and at one point the n-word gets tossed into the mix. Blech all around.

“The Synthetic Barbarian” (1992). That last piece disgruntled me, and this one — in which Rivers takes two well-heeled ignoramuses to trophy-hunt in the Oligocene — does nothing to improve the vibe. Both clients are quietly racist, and one wants to live his “Viking barbarian” fantasies by bow-hunting brontothere. De Camp adds a pinch of homophobia, because why wouldn’t he? 

“The Satanic Illusion” (1992). A smug pair of fundamentalists pay Rivers to hop them through time to help them “disprove” evolution; as is the way of fundies, they refuse to see what’s in front of them and continue to insist on their particular interpretation of Genesis. This story is a slight improvement, in that I’m mad at the characters and not at de Camp. Still, I’d rather just read fun time adventures with neither fundies nor musty weird 20th century bigotry. Is that too much to ask here?

“The Big Splash” (1992). A coterie of scientists hires our guides to take them to the end of the Cretaceous to settle the extinction debate once and for all. This could have been a step up for this book — the terminal Cretaceous extinction is rote material for fiction, but at least it’s straightforward enough to discourage de Camp’s casual bigotry — but of course we can’t have nice things. (The time safari’s head camp boss, a Black man named — wait for it — Beauregard Black, refuses to accompany them on this mission, and de Camp burdens him with an especially Twainian dialect. Ugh.) I’m just speeding through these at this point to get to the end and be done.

“The Mislaid Mastodon” (1993). An indigenous non-profit wants to repopulate modern times with Pleistocene megafauna, and hires Rivers to help capture a mastodon. De Camp gives us the usual ’90s white author treatment of an indigenous character, naming him Norman Blackelk and repeatedly emphasizing the color of his skin at every opportunity. Inevitably, Blackelk gets talked into performing a “ghost dance” in a last-ditch effort to bring a suitable mastodon close to the time chamber. Otherwise this is another unremarkable tale in a book of quite repetitive stories.

“The Honeymoon Dragon” (1993). Oh, hey, with that title, wanna bet which ethnicity de Camp broadly pantomimes in this story? I expected Japanese, but de Camp keeps us on our toes by introducing an indigenous Australian scientist. (If you wondered if Dr. Algernon Mulgaru would bring along a hand-whittled boomerang, he does, because what else would a white author have him do?) This time Rivers and his wife Brenda are the tourists, popping into the Australian Pleistocene via the time chamber newly opened down under. I appreciate some good Diprotodon and Megalania action, but like all too many stories in this collection, the narration barely gives us any immersion in Deep Time.

And that’s that. Overall, disappointing but not especially surprising. Somehow the story published in the 1950s was one of the least casually bigoted entries of the lot. 

2023 read #93: Binti by Nnedi Okorafor.

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

93 pages

Published 2015

Read from September 6 to September 7

Rating: 3 out of 5

Binti is the first of the Himba people to be accepted into the galaxy’s prestigious Oomza University. Himba folk never leave their Namib homeland, however, let alone travel between the stars, so by leaving in the dead of night to follow her dreams into the university, Binti has cut herself off from her family, her friends, her community. Worse still, she finds herself in the midst of a conflict between the pale Khoush people of her own world and the deadly, jellyfish-like Meduse.

This is a promising novella, humming with potential, filled with fascinating worldbuilding and detail, weaving deep mathematics and destinies. There are starships grown from shrimp! And we always need more stories that incorporate the repatriation of remains from museums into their plots.

Unfortunately, Okorafor’s prose is uneven, wavering from good to mechanical on the same page. Certain lines were awkward enough to snap my always-delicate concentration: “I could hear the [other Meduse], their near substantial bodies softly rustling as their transparent domes filled with and released the gas they breathed back in.” At its worst, the prose feels like a first draft. The pacing, too, sometimes makes Binti feel more like an outline — Big Emotional Loss goes here, fill in the groundwork for it later.

I’m intrigued enough to check the next two out of the library. Fingers crossed they feel a bit more realized than this first novella.

2023 read #92: Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 3 by Itaru Kinoshita.

Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 3 by Itaru Kinoshita

Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara

Translated by John Neal

198 pages

Published 2022 (English translation published 2023)

Read September 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

Volumes one and two of the Dinosaur Sanctuary manga were among my favorite pieces of dinosaur fiction. They balanced a straightforward tale of zookeepers caring for prehistoric animals in a struggling wildlife park with a light helping of interpersonal drama. It’s a simple, winsome combination in a field all too often burdened with alien parasites and magic kung-fu. Truly, this is all dinosaur fiction ever needed to give me, and it so rarely meets even this minimum standard. Not even Jurassic World — ostensibly a movie about an operational dinosaur zoo — bothered to give us anything like this, to its shame.

Volume 3 offers few surprises and little variation on the formula. Which isn’t really a bad thing with a story this dialed-in on what I would like to see. New characters — specialist dino-keepers in different enclosures — keep things fresh as Suzume-chan rotates through their departments during this next stage of her training.

For the most part, Kinoshita emphasizes the dinosaurs and the caretaking aspects of life at Enoshima Dinoland. The little human dramas mostly recede out of sight. Admittedly, the main characters are little more than archetypes, so perhaps it’s best to let the dinosaurs — and the fantastic art — take over. That said, the side story “Dinosaur Fans Forever!” is a sweet, moving little interlude, possibly the best self-contained story arc so far in Sanctuary.

2023 read #91: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February 2023.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January / February 2023 issue (144:1-2)

Edited by Sheree Renée Thomas

258 pages

Published 2023

Read from August 20 to September 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

Awkward timing…

So. After the August 1990 issue of F&SF, I needed a palate-cleanser. What better way to rinse out the rancid aftertaste of the ’90s than with an issue from the best era of F&SF?

Halfway through reading this issue, I learned that F&SF had inadvertently accepted a story by a known white supremacist author, and (so the word initially went) wouldn’t walk back the publication upon receiving this information. It was a hugely disappointing development that negatively impacted my view of the magazine.

But as so often happens with these online cacophonies, a bunch of (mostly white) opportunists dog-piled on editor Sheree Renée Thomas, a Black woman who (obviously) would not deliberately platform a Nazi — instead of going after the actual Nazi in question, or the publisher who initially refused to pull the story. Thomas has published more Black and queer authors during her brief tenure than the rest of the magazine’s seventy-plus years put together. As many Black authors have pointed out, Thomas deserved grace and the benefit of the doubt — and received neither from all too many internet activists.

Eventually, the publisher — the one with the real power at F&SF — begrudgingly agreed not to publish the piece and made a half-hearted apology through a proxy. I fear some sort of professional reprisal against Thomas, who, again, has been the best editor in the magazine’s 75 year history. Even worse: white supremacists are already threatening violence, because terrorism has always been a tool of white supremacy.

So it was with some conflicted feelings that I (after a hiatus of a couple weeks) read the back half of this issue.

“Cowboy Ghost Dads Always Break Your Heart” by Stefan Slater. Absolutely killer title for an ethereal tearjerker of a story. As someone who’s often felt see-through, this one hit me right in the chest. Plus: ghost T. rex! Excellent.

“A Creation of Birds” by Tegan Moore. A languid, surreal, occasionally unnerving journey through an evocative afterlife. Much to my liking, there are birds everywhere. All the women Rose meets have a Secret, a bird whose name becomes theirs; Rose’s is a Hoopoe. (I’ve often mentioned how much I want more bird-centric fantasy.) But all is not well beneath the pleasant, empty, banal small talk affected by the other bird-named women. Something (or someone) is tearing the bloody heart out of Secrets, and the others don’t seem to like that Rose keeps getting called back by her mother’s memories. The posthumous murder mystery is less compelling to me than the setting and its mutable unreality — but, of course, the two quickly prove intertwined. Overall, I found this novelette most enjoyable.

“Dzherelo (The Source)” is a poem by R. B. Lemberg, author of The Four Profound Weaves, one of my faborite books. It is fully as compelling as you would hope.

“Floating on the Stream that Brings from the Fount” by Prashanth Srivatsa. As a teenage sci-fi writer, I had the misfortune to read one of those “how to write and sell a novel” self-help books. One bit of advice was particularly etched into my brain: magic systems rooted in creativity, said the book, were old-hat, tiresome, on the same level as “it was all a dream.” No editor would ever want to read your book if the setting’s special magic was worked by singing, or writing, or dancing. That admonishment sank so deep into my teenage brain that, not only do I avoid creativity-magic a quarter century later, I actually have to remind myself that it's okay when someone else uses it. I had to fight that internalized skepticism to get into this novelette, a sprawling space opera set in a galactic Empire where stories are fed into an all-important Engine to create starship fuel. Captain Draupadi is dispatched by the Empire on the Marammat to hunt for a lost Library said to exist in the far edge of the galaxy. The Library is rumored to hold enough Old Earth stories to power the Engine for three centuries. But the loyalties of the motley crew are far from alignment — least of all Draupadi’s. The concept of a monolithic entity squeezing creativity into a product is reminiscent of Ai Jiang’s excellent I AM AI. Clearly, there can be life left in any trope — so long as you have something interesting and relevant to say with it. Quite good.

“The Past Is a Dream (The Launch of a Blacktopia)” by Maurice Broaddus. This story is an oral history of the namesake character of Broaddus’ Astra Black series, which I haven’t read. An oral history format for the backstory of a character I’ve never encountered feels like a double dose of narrative distance, an emotional arm's length. But this is Broaddus, so the setting — and how he links it to our modern colonialist-capitalist world — is compelling, with his usual mix of humor, a righteous stand against exploitative injustice, and classic funk references.

So, it was right in between these stories that I learned that F&SF had accepted that piece by a known Nazi author; the retraction wouldn’t be made public for a full week, while the publisher dragged his feet and let Sheree Renée Thomas face the outcry without support. That isn’t the fault of the authors here, of course. It isn’t Thomas’ fault, either. It does sour my opinion on F&SF as an institution, especially when you consider how many heinous authors it published without equivalent protest during its lengthy history. Only the Black woman editor got singled out, for some strange reason…

“To Give Moon Milk to a Lover” by Madalena Daleziou. A wondrous and lovely tale of moons and magic inspired by Greek folklore, full of herbs and self-discovery and delicate glints of feeling. Excellent.

Two poems by Beth Cato and Rhonda Parrish: “The Deal” and “Lucky Shot.” Of the two, I liked “The Deal” best.

“The Bucket Shop Job” by David D. Levine. This is a tale of illegal deals and backroom baits-and-switches set in the industrial wastelands of Titan. Our narrator Kane, stranded on Titan with no way to afford a ticket out, lives in the refinery stink and makes his living with his fists. Imagine the libertarian space utopias of Heinlein, but reevaluate them from the perspective of the proletariat indentured and forced to labor off their corporate oxygen debt, and give them a not-quite-noir flavor of space-tommyguns and organized crime. I dig where this novelette is coming from, but I never quite gelled with it. Quippy heists never were my favorite trope, not even when paired with low-gravity fisticuffs and a socialist ethos. Honestly, this just goes to show the quality of the Thomas era of F&SF. This would have been a standout story in any given issue from the Ferman or Van Gelder eras. Here, it just recedes into the background excellence.

“Oracle” by Morgan L. Ventura. Haunting, lyrical, brief microfic. Gorgeous.

“Sis’ Bouki: the Hyena Gifts” by Rob Cameron is a staggering standout of a poem, one of the very best I’ve ever read in F&SF.

“Off the Map” by Dane Kuttler. It’s especially harrowing to read this near-future tale of corporate-bureaucratic “family values” now, as right-wing authoritarians around the country continue to innovate new ways to destroy queer and BIPOC families and cycle their children into the prison-industrial complex — and as real estate grifters profit in the aftermath of climate catastrophes. A gripping story that doesn’t go where you expect.

“Save Me, Sister, You Said” is a poem by Gerri Leen, retelling (and reframing) the story of Ariadne and the Minotaur. Quite good.

“Persephone’s Children” by C. B. Channell. This mythological retelling reframes Melinoë as a moody goth teenager who reluctantly accompanies Persephone up to the sunlit world to hang out with her half-brother Dionysus — who, in the way of gods, is up to something shitty. The prose skews a bit YA. Not my cup of tea, but I didn’t dislike it.

“Best, Last, Only” by Robert Reed. A novella in full late ’90s mode, a sprawling depiction of a vast starship older than any galaxy, technological immortality, recreational cannibalism, and alien beings resembling Quetzalcoatlus imbued with boundless arrogance. Tens of thousands of years pass; species and invasions rise and fall. I’ve never read any of Reed’s Great Ship stories, but Reed is enough of a professional to convey the setting’s strangeness and scale without requiring familiarity with what went before. That imagery is the main strength of this story, which doesn’t offer much in the realm of emotional connection. Still, a fine experience that brought me back to being a teen, enthralled by the rococo vastness of galaxy-spanning stories fashionable at the time.

And that’s it. Another strong entry from what remains F&SF’s finest era. I’ve debated whether to continue to support this magazine after glimpsing the cavalier attitude behind the scenes, but I continue to believe in Sheree Renée Thomas, at any rate. So far she hasn’t let me down.

2023 read #90: Every Poem a Potion, Every Song a Spell by Stephanie Parent.

Every Poem a Potion, Every Song a Spell by Stephanie Parent

99 pages

Published 2022

Read September 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

I hit a bit of a reading skid there. I was trying to do more with my kid before summer ended, and then some awful things happened at one of my favorite periodicals (which I’ll touch on in a later review). So I haven’t had the time or the heart to read much at all these last two weeks.

This is a lovely collection of poems that explores both the darkness and the magic of fairy tales. In “shades of darkness and blood,” Parent explores the cunning and secrecy required to survive as a woman in patriarchal society: the looming violence from wolves and men, the narrative of inferiority and expectation of submission, the steady suffocation of her own desires. Even the most dutiful and demure girl might lust for a taste of blood.

Eroticism and bloodshed pulse through many of the poems, wild and strange cruelties charged with birdsong. Cages and the branches of the wildwood are mirrors of each other; both can promise a form of escape. Love is a curse that binds its children to toil, to brambles, to emptiness. Parents make a wish in hopes for a child; the child is left to bear the curse of its consequence.

Some particular favorites:

“Into the Forest”

“Red Hood in the Woods”

“Clawed Creatures”

“Little Cages”

“Poissonnier”

“Part Two: Little Houses”

“Little Bones”

“The House on Chicken Legs”

“Thorns and Wings”

“Skin and Salt”

“Blessed Curse”

“Epilogue: Disenchanted”

2023 read #89: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1990.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1990 issue (79:2)

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

162 pages

Published 1990

Read from August 18 to August 20

Rating: 1 out of 5

Back at it again with another SFF magazine from the turn of the ’90s featuring dinosaurs on the cover. Previously, I read two issues of Asimov’s that fit this hyper-specific niche: November 1988 and November 1990. Not to be left out, F&SF boarded the ’90s dinomania train (literally!) with this issue. Sounds fun, right?

Well.

Content warning: discussions of racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and fictional genocide ahead.

“In the Upper Cretaceous with the Summerfire Brigade” by Ian Watson. Right out of the gate (sorry, that’ll be the last of the train puns), I have issues with this one. Our narrator is a failing writer who hasn’t informed his “whining,” “selfish” wife or his 16 year old kid about their precarious finances. He’s just about the most unappealing of narrators, yet this was the go-to “Everyman” of this era. He boards a train to London for a dicey meeting with his publisher; at the station he spends an inordinate amount of time checking out a 17 year old “brown-skinned girl” and trying to pinpoint her ethnic background. The train, of course, is a technological marvel: it zips through the Cretaceous as it speeds to London. The girl, of course, is a terrorist: part of a group hijacking the time-train to demand better treatment for Asian immigrants. The whole thing is distasteful on many levels, and also not especially well written. (Why would Anita, the teenage radical, be beguiled by Bernard, the washed-up, middle-aged, genteelly racist wanker who’s been making eyes at her and treating her with affable condescension?) There isn't even any dinosaur action, just some glimpses of scaly boys in the distance. It ends (spoilers?) with our narrator musing that resettling immigrants in the Miocene is an elegant, equitable solution that should work for everyone. (It’s still Britain, after all!) All in all, what a waste of a dynamite title. Imagine that title gracing a novella about a time traveling scout troop or a Campanian summer camp, or maybe a novel about firewatch volunteers in the Laramide foothills. Sigh... what could have been. F

I've shared this anecdote in other reviews, but it's particularly relevant here, so I'll tell it again: In 1999, I was a 16 year old sci-fi writer. I imagined myself a wunderkind, needing just a couple big breaks to become a bestselling novelist. I submitted a novella to F&SF that year, 25k words of Late Cretaceous time-tourism that earned me my very first positive personal rejection. Then-editor Gordon Van Gelder wrote, “The time for this sort of thing is past, alas.” That “alas” became a load-bearing girder of my self-worth; it told my teenage self that Van Gelder would have accepted my story if the dinosaur market hadn’t crashed since the early ’90s. And maybe he would have. Not to praise my teen writing (it was awful), but it was better than “Summerfire Brigade.” If I’d been 16 in 1989 instead of 1999, and writing at that same level, I bet I really could’ve been a sci-fi wunderkind.

In an odd coincidence, when I tried to rewrite that novella into a novel in the mid-2000s, I independently came up with the idea of time-trains. Just one more reason to be disappointed with “Summerfire Brigade.”

“Herself” by Katharine Newlin Burt. In an unexpected swerve, this is a reprint of a horror story first published in 1930. For a magazine that doesn’t consider unsolicited reprints, F&SF printed a fair share of them when they happened to feel like it. “Herself” is, for its time, a fairly explicit deconstruction of gender and social norms among the white and privileged. It follows our unnamed young heroine — chaste and “clean,” raised by a Mother who pretends that everything is pretty and that the socially accepted pretense built around “womanhood” is the prettiest of all — as well as Herself, an earthy, crude, bloody inversion of our heroine, well aware of the ugliness and cruelty of life. Herself has no illusions that women are ever protected the way society likes to pretend; Herself knows the sadism inherent in “virtuous,” authoritarian parenting, and relishes in it. Our heroine clings to the social script: “She knew at once that he was the right man because he matched with all the Pretty Things, with guardian angels and the Big Kind Man with Wings.” She’s scared of Herself but drawn to her in equal measure. The first couple pages are the story’s peak, a vertiginous masterpiece of modernism. But the rest of the story is still marvelously unnerving, pulling the polite gauze and secret skin away from the insidious, sickly horrors of “respectable” social norms. Inevitability, given its original publication date, certain aspects of “Herself” are dubious. But overall, I’m impressed. B

“The Three Wishes” by John Morressy. Much like Morressy’s “Conhoon and the Fairy Dancer” in the March 2000 F&SF, this is a middling humorous fantasy involving folkloric little people and boots that need mending. Clearly this was his idiom. This one does the whole “magical bureaucracy” bit that was popular at the time, nothing exciting, with a not-that-subtle allegory for the government’s treatment of veterans worked into it. C-

“We Were Butterflies” by Ray Aldridge. “[A] compelling and frightening extrapolation of the war against drugs,” promises the editorial introduction — I can imagine few sentences less appetizing in a mainstream publication in 1990. In the grim future of phosphate pits, death camps, and the Big Dry, an old man dying of lungrot somehow manages to tell our narrator long-winded tales about dope in bygone Denver. If you thought that was peak 1990, just wait until you read a sample: “I was sorta caught between being scared of the Battery Man, and wanting to stare at his girlfriend’s tits.” We hop back and forth between the dying man’s stories and our narrator — who had been chief aide to a tough-on-drugs politician, once upon a time. Our narrator, in turn, swings between 1990ish flashbacks and the Big Dry future. Said politician is acting-chief-executive for life, thanks to his dictatorial management of the “drug catastrophe”; the death camps are for drug offenders — which includes anyone who ever tried drugs, thanks to draconian Future Drug Test Technology. It’s grody Boomer bait, but what else would you expect? At least it’s honest about how the self-proclaimed “family values” fascists need a constant supply of scapegoats to maintain their power. D-

“His Spirit Wife” by Karen Haber. Another early ’90s bummer, jam-packed with internalized misogyny and weird racism. Newlywed blonde Sarah was “saved” from her stressful medical career by wealthy husband David. David’s long-term housekeeper Rosa — “small and brown” — attempts to trap poor blue-eyed Sarah’s soul with a “Gamberian Spirit Wife,” a “fetish doll” placed on the mantel, because… Rosa wants David for herself? I guess? Upper class cis-het white folks’ concerns are fucking weird. Irredeemable trash. F

While not exactly a story, a “Crossweird Puzzle” by Larry Tritton is listed as one in the table of contents. I’d gloss over it as a bit of frivolity, except some of the clues are… iffy as fuck. 21 down, for instance, is a shitty antisemitic “joke” about money. That’s a big yikes from me, buckaroos.

“In the Wheels” by Daryl Gregory. Long after nuclear winter and pandemic take out “Dead City,” country boys Zeke and Joey sneak into town to find a car they can race. It’s pretty standard stuff for the post-nuclear genre — polygamous bible cults, superstitions about “rads,” zombies — with a dollop of demons and stock-car racing thrown in. It was professionally put together, not blatantly racist, and only moderately horny (despite the polygamy). It isn’t anything spectacular, but it’s palatable, and that counts for plenty in this issue. B-

There’s, uh, been some questionable content in this issue so far. I mean, even more so than usual. Right? Oh, just you wait.

“Days of Miracles and Wonder” by Gregg Keizer. We wrap things up with a white Louisiana author who has something to say about Apartheid-era South Africa. How bad could it be? Who am I kidding — it’s fucking atrocious. There was a fashion during this time for privileged authors to Make a Point About Social Injustice by writing the most heinous, genocidal shit they could imagine about marginalized communities. (We white authors still do this to some extent, but it’s less fashionable now, or else I’m not reading books that have it.) So, massive trigger warnings here for fictional genocide, racism, and white saviorism. This story tries to Make You Think by depicting a future Afrikaner Free State that “turned this country into something God, and a white man, could be proud of” by firebombing millions of Bantu. Like, regardless of your intentions, are you sure this is making the statement you want it to make? Are you not simply dehumanizing the communities you “support” even further? It fucking ends with our protagonist Piet, now a ghost, being held and comforted by a Bantu ghost woman after he switches sides to the Pan-African ghost army and kills his genocidal cousin. Absolutely foul. I really need a grade below F

Well, shit. This was just about the most heinous issue of F&SF I’ve ever read. The most heinous issue of anything I've read, really. The two okay stories did nothing to ameliorate it. All this because it had dinosaurs on the cover.

2023 read #88: Whereas by Layli Long Soldier.

Whereas by Layli Long Soldier

106 pages

Published 2017

Read from August 17 to August 18

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

The first half of this collection explores how language is shaped for propaganda as well as for truth. The violence of colonialism and its empty depravities, the fragmentation of self and social bonds, the scattered bones it leaves behind, all latticed and woven into fragmentary imagery and misleading occlusions. Words are tools of empire, carelessly wielded so long as the results are the same. The American empire breaches treaties with impunity. Words, however, are also possessions of the dispossessed. 

Balancing words to figure an understanding of landscape and language, Long Soldier pulls us through dizzying heights of diction, the vertigo of overlapping sounds and meaning, gaps left behind by genocide and the deliberate gutting of many cultures on behalf of the American empire. In the gaps are words too large to emerge from one throat. Grief too large to encompass condenses into loss.

“A poem about writing, bo-ring,” begins one section of “Vaporitive,” then concludes, “What am I doing here, writing. What am I doing here righting the page at funerals.” The next section muses, “I notice the carcass and her bark: both absent. / So I learn to write around it, the meat, in wide circles to be heard.”

The second half is a response to the cynical delivery and language of the 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. To call the resolution performative would imply that anyone behind it cared enough to perform. Long Soldier’s rebuttal is astonishing, inexorable and nearly breathless, a document of a lifetime — many lifetimes — of systematic disempowerment, marginalization, partitioning. Generations of genocide and dehumanization by the colonial hordes, caught and illuminated in the language of the Resolution and in the interactions Long Soldier relates, with strangers, with family, with self, with separation. “(2) Resolutions” is as stunning a work of poetry I’ve ever encountered.